“Covert action is bad for the reputations of both the CIA and the United States. But in an age of undeclared wars, it’s not hard to understand why an intelligence agency became repeatedly embroiled in military operations.”

 By Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

THE CIA IS a civilian agency. In times of war, the military’s own intelligence arms take on a more prominent role. Yet in our modern era, the CIA has been consistently involved in America’s military activities. There are several reasons for this.

One is the United States’ acceptance of the principle, adopted at the seventh International Conference of American States in Montevideo in 1933, whereby no Western Hemisphere nation would intervene by force in the affairs of another. This meant that if the United States wanted to intervene to protect its interests it would need to do so surreptitiously. This happened, for example, when the CIA used clandestine military means to topple the left-leaning government of Guatemala in 1954.

A second reason that has opened the door for the CIA is the adoption, in San Francisco, of the United Nation Charter in 1945. The charter prohibited the use of force in international relations. From the war in Vietnam to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, nations have since then avoided outright declarations of war. Like the Montevideo resolution, this has opened the door for covert military operations such as those conducted by the CIA.

Of course, the term ‘war’ has not vanished from our vocabulary. Yet it has had varying meanings. In the Cold War between the communist bloc and liberal-democratic nations, the CIA played a propaganda role, sometimes referred to as ‘psychological warfare.’ This had a variety of manifestations. For example, when communists threatened to take over publishing facilities in post-war western Europe, the CIA countered by buying up most of the available supply of printing ink. Another example occurred in the Philippines where the left-leaning Hukbalahap or Huk rebellion at one point seemed on the verge of triumph. There, the CIA’s Ed Lansdale launched a “hearts and minds” operation. One of its conspicuous features was the construction of numerous school buildings. Lansdale’s premise, correct in this case, was that educated people do not vote communist.

Another CIA activity in the 1950s was non-military, even anti-military. It poured cold water on the Pentagon’s claim that the Soviet Union had opened a “bomber gap,” and later a “missile gap,” with the United States, exceeding America’s power in both areas. The CIA’s civilian director, Allen Dulles, questioned claims of military leaders that America needed more tanks, more bombers, more ships. Dulles was lucky to serve under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Formerly supreme commander of Allied forces in World War II, ‘Ike’ could see right through the generals’ motives and in his famous Farewell Address warned his fellow-Americans against the lobbying activities of the “military-industrial complex.” In fact, American restraint in the arms race may have helped save the world from a terminal nuclear war.

At various points in the era between the formation of the CIA in 1947 and the collapse of communism in Europe in the early 1990s, the Cold War turned hot.

Korea and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan are examples, but the Vietnam War was the conflict through which the CIA became most famously involved.

At first, Lansdale’s hearts and minds approach prevailed in Southeast Asia. However, local circumstances doomed it to failure. Communist North Vietnam persisted in penetrating the non-communist South, where its cadres met with some measure of local support. Corruption in the Washington-backed Saigon government meant that U.S. dollars allocated to improving the quality of life for ordinary South Vietnamese ended up in the wrong hands. Hanoi’s agents leveraged the resentment this bred among the population.

In 1964, under the direction of President Lyndon B. Johnson, the U.S. intervened in Vietnam militarily, first with bombing and soon with ground troops. Lansdale-style nation building went out the window.

Yet this by no means ended the CIA’s participation in the Vietnam war. Let’s look at two examples, beginning with the ‘numbers’ controversy.

Sam Adams, an analyst at the CIA, fresh from Harvard and bolstered by the self-assurance that comes from one’s descent from two early American presidents, challenged the U.S. Army’s order-of-battle estimates of the enemy Viet Cong facing the American-led war effort. He argued that the communists had greater strength than the army reckoned, especially when one looked at reserves the guerrillas could draw upon. Adam’s estimates were discounted.

He would be proven right in 1968 when the communists launched their Tet campaign. The suddenness and ferocity of the offensive, which exploded across South Vietnam, shocked the American public, who up until that point had largely supported the U.S. war effort. The Viet Cong even broke into the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon — a doomed yet highly symbolic move.

A few years later, Adams made known his differences with the U.S. Army and he became a hero of the anti-war movement. However, retrospective analysis showed how the Viet Cong had failed to hold on to its Tet gains and had suffered crippling losses in the course of U.S. forces’ counterattack.

It was not the only controversy in which the CIA was involved. Both President Johnson and his successor President Richard Nixon were convinced that the burgeoning anti-war movement in the United States was being orchestrated from North Vietnam’s capital Hanoi, from Beijing, from Moscow, or from all three of these communist capitals. Both administrations asked the CIA to investigate the protest movement — an illegal request, as the CIA’s 1947 charter forbad it from operating domestically. The CIA did however investigate. The agency found that the protesters were not foreign directed, but purely indigenous to the United States. Despite this finding, when the story of its investigation leaked, it caused a scandal that helped contribute to the U.S. withdrawal from the war.

For some, the end of the Cold War meant the CIA was no longer needed, as its prime function had been to fight the communists. Senator Daniel P. Moynihan even introduced a bill to abolish the agency. It failed to win approval on Capitol Hill. Within a decade, a new war would breathe new life into the CIA: the war on terrorism.

As ever, military intelligence played the dominant role in conventional operations, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the war on terror is a supreme example of an undeclared war – one fought against a stateless enemy. Once again, after Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA played a significant part in the hunt for al Qaeda, very often in tandem with the military and sometimes in cooperation with the private sector.

“Rendition,” the controversial apprehension of terrorist suspects and their deportation from the scenes of their alleged crimes, was one CIA activity. Another was what became known as “enhanced interrogation” (which some simply called torture) – aimed, for example, at discovering the location of Osama bin Laden and others suspected of having inspired and planned the appalling 9/11 attack. These activities were not, characteristically, military in character and were widely condemned when details of them emerged.

When, however, the CIA finally pinpointed Bin Laden’s location, his elimination became a joint CIA-military exercise. The operation that led to the killing of the Al Qaeda leader in his Abbottabad, Pakistan compound on May 2, 2011 was conducted by SEAL Team Six, highly trained U.S. Navy professionals. However, as the hit occurred in a ‘friendly’ country whose leaders had not received prior notification for fear that they would blab, the SEALs had to be “sheep-dipped,” meaning that they were given CIA identities to avoid diplomatic embarrassment, should the mission be compromised. The whole affair summarized quite neatly the role that the CIA played in the latest phase of global undeclared warfare.

In the present century, CIA cooperation with the military has been extensive. Drone strikes, one of President Barrack Obama’s favored strategies in combatting terrorism, continue to be conducted by the military, but the targets are usually identified by the CIA, which has the added responsibility of minimizing civilian casualties (collateral damage). This is not always achieved. Thus, one reason why the recent killing of Bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahri in a Kabul drone strike met with acclaim was the precision whereby an urban drone attack killed only its target.

Little can be said about the CIA’s activities in Ukraine as current activities are necessarily secret. But the conflict is another example of an undeclared war. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is at great pains to say it is just a military operation and the United States is equally careful to avoid giving the impression that it is at war with Russia. The situation is custom-made for the CIA operating in harness with military intelligence.

In my book A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA (Oxford UP) I argue that covert action is bad for the reputations of both the CIA and the United States. But in an age of undeclared wars, it’s not hard to understand why what was intended to be an intelligence agency became repeatedly embroiled in military operations.

Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is the author of A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA. An Emeritus Professor of American history at the University of Edinburgh, he studied at the Universities of Wales, Michigan, Harvard, and Cambridge, and is the honorary president of the Scottish Association for the Study of America. He has held visiting fellowships and professorships in Harvard, Berlin, and Toronto. He is the author of a prize-winning book on the American left, and of sixteen other books published in eleven languages, mainly on US intelligence history, including The CIA and American Democracy (1989), The FBI: A History (2007), In Spies We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence (2012), and We Know All About You (2017).